STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced the acquisition of Atira, a provider of software and tools that help academic institutions and researchers manage and improve their research outcomes. Atira complements Elsevier's SciVal by expanding the scope of data to report on research activities across an academic institution, and by broadening the range of tools and dashboards to analyse those data.
Atira’s main product, Pure, is a flexible research information system that enables the planning, evaluation and reporting of research activities. Pure accesses, extracts, incorporates and normalises data from internal data sources such as human resources, finance and grant awards systems, from research projects’ progress reports, from subscribed datasets such as Scopus and from other proprietary and public datasets, to enable a complete picture of the research enterprise.
Pure makes it easy to aggregate, process and visualise these disparate data sources into dashboards and tools, enabling research leaders to monitor and manage their institutions' research activities and to identify opportunities for improvement. Funding bodies and government departments also have an increasing thirst to collect, evaluate and analyse data. Pure’s tools help support this purpose by helping universities submit data, for instance, to national assessment exercises such as the UK's Research Excellence Framework.
Atira is a Danish company founded in 2002 and operating in Northern Europe. Its technical domain is computer science and software engineering with a focus on server-side software architecture and systems integration. Financial details of the acquisition have not being disclosed.
